Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Walking with Ghosts

ED NOTE:This isn’t the complete story, just my
recollections of the fantastic and fascinating day we had trying to track down
my father-in-law’s war experiences.

Don’t you just love it when you have one thing planned and
then something unexpected happens that totally changes your plans?Well, maybe, not always, but sometimes
Serdipity comes to play.

Yesterday, we had planned a day with a tour guide to take us
through the Normandy Beaches.In talking
with him about what we wanted to see, he asked if we had family that had died
in Normandy.Bob, Rob’s dad, had been
critically injured at Argentan, on August 18, 1944, so I mentioned that to
Rudy.He began drilling down, wanting
Bob’s unit particulars, dates, etc.He
suggested that we spend less time on the beaches, and go to Argentan to see
what we could find. Sounded like a great plan to us!

When we met up with Rudy, he suggested we head first for
Argentan, about 40 miles from Bayeaux.As we drove, he and Rob talked about what had happened to Bob, his later
years after the war, his life.We had
copies of some articles written about the 318th Division (Bob’s
division) from the internet, and there were several historic photos and a
couple of maps.Rudy was able to
determine exactly where the battle took place from the maps, and we first drove
through the forest where the German tanks that the 318th fought were
hidden.Then, Rudy decided we should go
find the little village where much of the battle took place, and see if we
could find the Mayor’s office.He has
had good luck with this strategy, as often someone in the office has more
and/or better information than he has.After
he got back in the car, he said, “I have a surprise for you.Let’s see if he’ll talk to us, but the ladies
in the office say there’s a man in this village that saw the battle.”Whoa.An actual witness!

Rudy knocked on the man’s door, and we were promptly invited
in.Serge, the witness, was 9 at the
time of the battle and living in a house just up the street in the same
village.His wife, Micheline, sat
quietly as we listened to Serge tell his story through Rudy.

Serge remembers the first day of the battle quite well
because the fighting was pretty intense near where his house was.All the villagers left that night and came
back a few days later.He remembers
piles of discarded equipment and materiel.At one point, he mentioned the farm where the American troops had to cross
a little stream, and that they had to cut down all the trees so that their
tanks could cross.Then, he offered to
take us to the farm, which was just down the road from his house.

He and Rudy kept talking.Serge talked about finding a pile of discarded items and among the items
were 5 helmets, each with a single hole.He spoke for a long time about how poor and hungry everyone was and how
his father managed to get a little something for his family when others
couldn’t.It seems his father was the
town’s only baker and as such, was immediately conscripted into working at the
castle baking bread for the Nazi officers.Since he had access to the bread, maybe sometimes, it didn’t all make it
to the Germans.

Rob, Serge, and me at the farm

Listening to all this, and occasionally adding a comment of
her own, was Micheline.She finally
interrupted her husband and told her story.Her family was from the same village, although she was only 13 mos. When
the battle happened.Her father had been
executed for being in the Resistance, and when the battle started, fearing for
her own life because she was also in the Resistance, her mother fled the
village with her two children.They
found refuge in a barn, but a shell hit the barn, and pretty much nothing of
her mother remained.Her 3-year old
brother sustained significant shrapnel wounds, but survived to the age of 38,
succumbing to the health effects of the shrapnel.Micheline and her brother were declared
orphans, but her brother was sent to live with their grandparents, while she
grew up in a girls orphanage.Because
her mother is considered a victim of the war, she has a permanent resting place
and can never be removed.

Then, Micheline took off into the kitchen, looking for
something.She came back with two sheets
of paper.This was the story of her
aunt, Odette, and how she made it through the war. Odette and her husband had a
casino, according to the account, in Oujstrehan, which was on the very north
end of Juno Beach and heavily bombarded.A missile hit the casino, and Odette scrambled to help people out before
it collapsed.She got two of her friends
to hide in a foxhole big enough for one person, so their heads and shoulders
stuck up above the protection of the hole.She lay face-down next to them with her feet toward the beach.A shell hit near where she lay, severely
damaging one leg, blowing off one of her buttocks and injuring her in the
abdomen. A male friend of hers was also
severely injured. The British medics who
eventually came, tried to evacuate her to their hospital ship, but she wanted
to wait for her husband, who was off on a mission for the Resistance. She
convinced her friend to go in her place.Plus, she didn’t didn’t want to go to Britain.After some time, they told her that her
husband had arrived and they were going to take her to him (knowing the gravity
of her situation, they lied.Some lies
are ok to tell.)Instead, they loaded
her onto a transport barge, which was then hit by a German torpedo.Being of compartmented construction, it
didn’t sink but they did have to raise the patients up to keep them from
getting wet.Ironically, the male friend
died when the hospital ship was also torpedoed.

After 6 months and many surgeries in Britain, she was sent
home with a prosthetic leg.Odette and
her husband rebuilt the casino and she could often be seen in the kitchen, leg
stump propped up on a stool, doing all the cooking for their guests and
family.The prosthesis was very
uncomfortable for her, and she did without it whenever she could.The casino/hotel was sold in the ‘70’s
because the children were not interested in running it, however, Micheline
remembers many good times with her aunt.

After about an hour and a half of listening to Micheline and
Serge, Rudy thought it might be time for us to go, but Serge insisted on
showing us the farm.It turns out to be
the exact farm pictured in the articles that we had read about the battle.It’s almost without doubt that Bob crossed
over this farm on the way to the edge of the Argentan forest where, only hours
later, he would be wounded.The German
Panzers were hidden in a tree line and shooting down the hill into the American
forces.Bob jumped into a foxhole for cover, and the guy next to him started
trying to take out one of the tanks with a bazooka.The Germans fired on the bazooka and shrapnel
took off most of the front of Bob’s skull.When the Germans advanced, the Americans left him for dead, as did the
Germans.The next morning, when the
Americans retook the position, they noticed that Bob was moving and evacuated
him to a field hospital.We assume that
once he was stable, they moved him to the hospital at the castle where he
remained until he was evacuated by ship to England, where he spent 6 months
recuperating.

The farm in 1944

The farm in 2015

After seeing the farm, we went to the Chambois memorial,
where the grander outline of the battle, actually called the Falaise
Encirclement, could be seen.Earlier,
the British and Americans had tried to encircle the remaining Germans escaping
from the Normandy fortifications.Through ego on the parts of Montgomery and Patton, 40,000 managed to escape
and try to mount a counter attack.Canadian, Polish, British and American troops finally managed to
encircle them at Falaise and the Polish and Americans were the stopper at the
bottom of the bottle, so to speak.

Having heard and seen all this today, I couldn’t help but
feel the presence of the dead and the remains of the battles.I kept trying to picture the farm, the
countryside during the war, and it wasn’t difficult.Perhaps because I’d seen so many pictures,
but I think also because their presence and their deeds remain so fresh in the
memory of the people and in the memory of the land.